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Scientific Bulletin – Economic Sciences No. 7 (13)EU and Western Balkan: ambivalent relationship?Assistant Professor PhD Slavica MANICUniversity of Belgrade, Faculty of Economics11000 Belgrade, 6 Kamenicka St.,slavica@one.ekof.bg.ac.yuAbstractMentioning of non-harmonious process of globalization was intensified in the mid-1980sand it coincided with an occurrence of accelerating economic globalization. Some strongglobalizing tendencies have been noticed at European space, but they turned to processadvancing rather regional (like EU) than global integration. These regional processes surelyhave some positive consequences, but they also produced negative implications for actors atEuropean economic scene, causing emergence of two categories of participants, havingactive or passive role in globalization decision taking.Contradiction between proclaimed integrative processes (persuading about the necessityand inevitability of economic integration) and actual state of affairs (asymmetricalinterdependence, making further economic integration more difficult) has caused continualredefining of Europe’s conceptual moves. When EU realized that mission to create andimpose its own, specific globalization mode has not been widely acceptable, it decided tochange the tactic and apply well known (but a little bit modified) globalization mode “athome”. That is why this paper is conceived: a) to answer has the above-mentioned decisionimpeded realization of its latent wish to create counterbalance to USA’s dominance; b) tofind out what were the consequences of such decision for Western Balkan countries andwhy their relationship with EU can be labeled as ambivalent one.Keywords: integration, globalization, European Union, Western Balkan countries1. IntroductionRegarding contemporary economic life, we can easily notice that the world economy ischaracterized by unprecedented internationalization of economic activity. The evidence ofincreased level of international economic relations is, however, very often used to substantiatefully and truly global world economy. The real state of affairs is in a certain extent different:only few advanced countries constitute the greatest part of international economy (Glyn, 2004;Rauch, 2005; Veseth, 2005; Barry and Slater, 2005) and only two actors (USA and EU) weremost often mentioned as global ones.Being more homogenous, USA generally experienced less trouble to adapt to globalizationtendencies. At the same time, EU (due to its constantly being faced with heterogeneity problemsfollowed by high adjustment costs caused by further enlargement) has become “a battlegroundfor globalization proponents and opponents” (Hooghe, 2003, p. 3). The former promoted globalinterdependence as the goal Europe should strive to, while the latter insisted on protecting anddefending “old” European values from global attacks. Proponents of globalization dominatedover opponents, which certainly influenced the way EU (as the whole) responded toglobalization.Being interested in causal mechanisms accounting for shifts in European strategy, we are firstgoing to analyze has EU reacted appropriately and, later on, whether potential candidates (at the“periphery”) happened to be “collateral damage” of that (changed) tactic.9